F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s long 1920 story (or novelette?), “May Day,” opens with a city celebration of American victory in World War One as the soldiers return. One senses, however, that the American people do not really understand why the war was fought, and in any case they can be “thoroughly fed up” with roaming soldiers. The victory is assuredly not affecting the life of a young civilian called Gordon Sterrett, who is newly unemployed and miserable (“I’ve made a hell of a mess of everything”) and goes to a hedonistic friend who lets him down. The three events described in the story are based on three actual events, with the participating characters traveling, Fitzgerald tells us, “down the great highway of a great nation.” But why are they dissatisfied with American life? Should anyone in America be drinking to excess? (No.) Whence comes hedonism? “May Day” may suggest that U.S. people are no longer meant for, or worthy of, meaningful victories. A sad tale, this.
Author: EarlD Page 2 of 316
The French Amelie (2000), a monster hit in the country of its origin, is as offputting as it is enchanting. Winsome Audrey Tautou enacts an intensely shy, peculiar do-gooder of sorts who falls hard for a solitary fellow employed at a porn shop.
“Am I the only one who finds Amelie [the do-gooder] just a tad creepy?” asks critic Charles Taylor. No, I do too. I find the entire movie a tad creepy, for all its visual vivacity. Should we expect anything different from a film whose treatment of sex is contemptibly cheap, a romp without consequences? For one thing, even the porn shop receives a friendly nod from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Cover of Amelie
At first, I was afraid the 1946 Deception, directed by Irving Rapper, would be awash in background music, but it isn’t. It simply offers some good music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in a setting with serious musicians, one of them played by Bette Davis.
Imdb.com: “After marrying her long-lost love [Paul Heinreid], a musician [Davis] finds the relationship threatened by a wealthy composer [Claude Rains] who is besotted with her.” This constitutes Deception‘s drama. Notwithstanding, adapted from a play, the film is pretty talky, I enjoyed it. I have actually seen very little of Davis in movies; here, she’s an accomplished actress. Rains plays a contemptible man elegantly (of course).
In Revanche (2009), from Austria, an ex-con named Alex (Johannes Krisch) works for a scurvy pimp and is secretly in love, and in a sexual relationship, with one of the pimp’s prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). Both wish to get away from the pimp and raise enough money to pay the drug-addicted Tamara’s debts, so Alex devises a plan. He’ll rob a bank for some short-term cash, the two will flee Vienna for Ibiza where Alex has a chance of co-owning a bar. During the execution of the plan, however, Tamara gets killed by a policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), who is thereafter obsessed with what he’s done. He doesn’t know exactly how the killing took place and his inner turmoil affects both his work and his marriage to Susanne (Ursula Strauss). To Alex the shooting was murder (he’s wrong) and he doesn’t want Robert to go on living. Early in the film, the pimp asserts that Alex believes he’s a tough guy but really isn’t. While living with his grandfather in a rural area, where coincidentally Robert and Susanne also live, will Alex turn into a tough guy and avenge himself by killing the policeman?
Even viewing it on DVD, I can see that Gotz Spielmann’s film, which never played in Tulsa, is a terrific work of art.
The effect of being deprived of a lover and thereafter alone is staggering. The scenes of city life in Vienna and then of doings in the countryside are equally compelling. Except for Alex’s grandfather, the people in Revanche are incomplete, stunted, because of the lure of ill-gotten gain, because of drug addiction, because of childlessness (in the case of Robert and Susanne). They face their own failure: Alex himself gets Tamara killed, Robert wishes he hadn’t killed her. Indeed, if the policeman did anything truly wrong, he eventually receives a comeuppance by being cuckolded. He is a pitiable man, and so, in a way, is Alex.
The film is Austrian, the title is French. “Revanche” is “revenge” in French. Spielmann may have given it this title because in France romantic notions about revenge, as about so many other things, were generated over the years. Even revenge against a policeman in the twentieth century–in French Algeria, perhaps?–could be considered as legitimate as revenge against the royal family during the Revolution. Yet Spielmann, I think, rejects such romanticism for his Austrian milieu. It never arises.
(This is a foreign film with English subtitles.)
Cover via Amazon
In the 2025 After the Hunt, a black college student from a rich family (Ayo Edebiri) informs a female professor (Julia Roberts) that she was sexually assaulted by a male friend and colleague of the professor (Andrew Garfield). The directing—by Luca Guadagnino—and the acting succeed, but the film is not only sober but sodden, with a less than sensible screenplay.
Not that it’s uninteresting, though. The film asks what is and what isn’t reality in a society with ignorant “radicalism,” naughty intellectuals, identity politics, and malcontent. It seems appropriate for there to be the artifice of someone yelling “Cut” at the end of ATH‘s last mise en scene. But, for sure, this isn’t a movie about moviemaking.